social attributes

• Social Cognition


  How we process and store social information and how this affects our perceptions and behaviour
• Social Cognition


  • Perceptions and behaviour and how influenced by others
• Attribution


  Process of assigning a cause to our own and others' behaviour
• Schemas


  Knowledge about concepts that make sense with limited information and facilitate top-down (theory-driven) processing
• Categories


  Organised hierarchically (associative network) as fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype
• Prototypes


  Cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category (average category member)
• Causal Attribution


  Inference process through which perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes
• Perspectives on how people make attributions

  • Naïve Scientist
  • Biased/Intuitionist
  • Cognitive Miser
  • Motivated Tactician
• Naïve Scientist


  • Rational and scientific-like in making cause-effect attributions, but information is limited and driven by motivations leading to errors and biases
• Motivated Tactician


  • Thinks deeply when required and only then, thinks carefully and scientifically about certain things when personally important or necessary, thinks quickly and uses heuristics for others when less important
• Attributional Theory (Weiner, 1979)

  Causality of Success or Failure: Locus (internal/external), Stability (e.g. natural ability/mood), Controllability (e.g. effort/luck)
• Attributional Retraining


  • University athletes encouraged to make more optimistic attributions, attributing outcomes to internal and controllable causes (Parker et al., 2018)
• Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones & Davis, 1965)


  Cues that an act reflects a true characteristic of the person: Act was freely chosen, Act produced a non-common effect, Not socially desirable, Hedonic relevance, Personalism
• Covariation Model (Kelley, 1967)


  Use multiple observations to try to identify factors that co-vary with behaviour and assign causal role to the factor(s), considering consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus
• People with depression attribute negative events to internal, global and stable causes
• Covariation does not equal causation
• Attributional Biases


  Systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feeling, intuition
• False Consensus


  • People with extreme views often overestimate others who have similar views, e.g., vaccines cause autism (Rabinowitz et al., 2016)
• Fundamental Attribution Error


  Tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions even when clear situational causes
• Actor-Observer Bias


  Tendency to attribute our own behaviour to situational factors but others' behaviour to dispositional factors
• Self-Serving Bias


  Tendency to attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors
• Heuristics


  Cognitive shortcuts that avoid effort and resources, providing quick and easy rules of thumb rather than complex mental judgments
• Types of Heuristics


  • Availability Heuristic, Representative Heuristic, Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic